انطلق

This time we’re heading to Egypt to visit my grandparents and do some sightseeing. Most of my recent knowledge of Egypt is gleaned from Penn & Teller and Anthony Bourdain. And yet I still want to visit pyramids and camels. Maybe even eat camels if the opportunity arises. Egypt is in the news quite a bit for something or another these days – I assume that something is negative because good news isn’t news and I have gotten such interesting looks from anyone who hears that’s where I’m heading. My response has uniformly been that if my grandparents can handle living there for a year, surely I’ll be fine for a week. Never mind that my grandfather is a retired Marine who has lived all over the world and my life can be described as devoted to avoiding exercise and sunshine.

In planning this trip, I did an excellent job early on, assuring we got our passports renewed (they expired 2 weeks too soon for the entry requirements), checking that the length of our stay didn’t require any special paperwork or shots, that sort of thing. Then I procrastinated until all the good flights were gone or too expensive. Then I let a few more months pass, realized it was almost time to leave, and threw some tours together kind of at the last minute. So last minute that here I am in the Dubai airport waiting for our connection to Cairo and there’s still one tour I haven’t gotten confirmed. If this all works out, I’ll have a travel agent to recommend.

Travel tip for those of you who think Egypt is an intimidating destination: maybe a layover in Dubai isn’t for you. The flight path crosses the tip of Syria before running most of the length of Iraq and gets really close to the Iranian border. I didn’t have a camera handy to photograph the on screen flight path, which is unfortunate as it was nice to see a map of the Middle East in the context of something other than war coverage.

(Also, a little travel tip for total strangers standing in line at the AA self check-in kiosks in Huntsville at five o’-fucking-clock in the morning: if the kiosk has a giant warning message with an exclamation mark on it that says wait for an attendant and other patrons are standing at it patiently waiting for an attendant, don’t stick your credit card in it to see if you can fix it. YOU ARE NOT HELPING, ASSHOLE. You are just making my morning longer. Asshole)

We don’t have a long enough layover to actually go into Dubai so it will remain, like Dallas, Dublin, and other destinations starting with D, a place I only know through its airport. One more flight and we’re meeting my grandparents in Cairo.